Christine Cupaiuolo’s Ms Musings blog is one of the best blogs out there – and I’m not saying that just because she’s a fellow Buffy fanatic. Here’s just a few good recent posts:
Ms Musings looks at how the media covers women’s sports, and is not impressed – the coverage of talent too often takes a back seat to babes and blondes.
There is some good news – the “participation gap” between girls and boys who participate in high school sports gets narrower every year. Currently, there are about 2.8 million girl athletes and 3.9 million boy athletes in high schools; the gap is almost entirely accounted for by the million or so high school boys who play football.
Ms Musings also has some information and links on the First Music Festival of Iran’s Regional Women – which is not the good news it may at first appear to be.
Finally, in the “depressing but notable” catagory, everyone should read this post of horror stories of how women are abused in China, Uganda and Kenya. The stories have many common links, but for me the big one is the connection between economic power and sexual freedom – if women and girls don’t have the former, too often they won’t have the latter.
The story from Kenya – in the Washington Post – is about the African tradition of “cleansers,” men whose job is to have sex “with women after their husbands die to dispel what villagers believe are evil spirits.”
The custom has always been unpopular among women. But in midst of an AIDS pandemic, which has led to the deaths of 19.6 million people in sub-Saharan Africa, having relations with the cleanser has become more than just a painful ritual that women must endure. Cleansers are now spreading HIV at explosive rates in such villages as Gangre, where one in every three people is infected.
The good news is, some women are organizing to overturn this deadly tradition..
I had a student who worked with the Peace Corps in Kenya, and she also told me about a male belief that having sex with virgins could not only prevent catching HIV, but remove it once you had it. The virgins are generally very young, often prostituted or raped, and often contract HIV. AIDS education and law enforcement could reduce that awful pattern. I’d talk now about the Bush AIDS in Africa initiative, except that he seems to have abandoned it.
Too bad they haven’t yet discovered Baghdad Burning (http://riverbendblog.blogspot.com/), which describes one of the most important ongoing struggles for women’s rights in the world today – the plight of women in Iraq as a result of the U.S. invasion of that country.
Eli Stephens
Left I on the News
http://lefti.blogspot.com
John, the topic was somewhat discussed in a post at Alas a while back on baby rape. It’s an old, strong myth that sex with a virgin will cure a venereal disease, where the majority of the population isn’t educated in science. (The myth was even held in England by all classes until relativelyrecently, when science and biology became common fare for schools) Thus education is the only way to eliminate that myth.